Trends – Innovation – ITSM – IT Architecture – Requirement Analysis – Business views – Service Governance – Storage – Virtualization etc… What do I do, why do I do it, and why does everyone else do what they do? Time to reflect and this is my little pot where I share my view and others great contributions to this IT-world!

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This is really cool and something that I personally love! Great move by Microsoft!! 🙂

If you have any questions about this acquisition or if you need assistance with your mobile app development contact us at EnvokeIT!

Microsoft to acquire Xamarin and empower more developers to build apps on any device

As the role of mobile devices in people’s lives expands even further, mobile app developers have become a driving force for software innovation. At Microsoft, we are working to enable even greater developer opportunity and innovation by providing the best experiences to all developers, on any device, with powerful tools, an open platform and a global cloud.

As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.

In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices – including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin’s unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies – and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop. Through Xamarin Test Cloud, all types of mobile developers—C#, Objective-C, Java and hybrid app builders —can also test and improve the quality of apps using thousands of cloud-hosted phones and devices. Xamarin was recently named one of the top startups that help run the Internet.

If you haven’t read Part 1 then I highly recommend doing so prior to going directly to the upgrade that we’re covering in this post!

Prepare for a journey in this post about Citrix StoreFront upgrade, uninstallation, console and how messy it could be! NOT all the time, sometimes it “just works”! 😉

My little NetScaler is already upgraded to 10.1 so unfortunately I couldn’t take you on that journey as well, so we’ll start with the StoreFront upgrade from 1.2 to 2.0 in this post. These are the steps that we need to cover as highlighted in the migration guide that seems very short and straight forward:

Upgrade StoreFront 1.2 to 2.0.

Logon to the StoreFront server console.

Upgrade StoreFront by running the StoreFront 2.0 installer as an administrator.

When the upgrade is completed, open StoreFront administration snap-in, remove CloudGateway controller from each store as this will be moved in the migration solution.

Open NetScaler Gateway Properties and for each gateway defined and change the version field in settings from 9.x to 10.0.x or later.

Test the configuration by logging on through web browser or Citrix Receiver.

Verify if the users are able to login and authenticate to StoreFront defined stores configured.

Is it this easy?

Ok, I’ve downloaded the 2.0 installer, and I’m logged on to the server.

Before we even start the upgrade there are things that could go wrong in removal or upgrades of StoreFront. And one that I’ve seen cause a lot of headache for a lot of people out there is that they have the Windows Firewall service disabled. Though the installation and removal wants to delete or add these rules the installation will fail unless this service is running. As you can see in this picture below you see the FW rule added in StoreFront 1.2:

So let’s verify that the Windows FW service is started, and it is!

I’ll now start the installation by double-clicking the StoreFront 2.0 installer!

What is this popup that came directly after starting the installer?

Wait, ok so you guys at Citrix couldn’t ask me whether you could do this for me? My plan is to upgrade, so please just add a little step in your upgrade program that does this for me… change request #1 for the next SF release and it’s upgrade process! Verify pre-requisites or deal with them!

Heads up out there! I’ve not verified this myself but it’s worth ensuring that you plan for an uninstallation in the event it’s true!

After applying Windows .Net Security Updates KB2729452, KB2737019, KB2729449 on two (2) existing Storefront 1.2 servers all of the storefronts and PNAgent services on the server ceased to work properly. Using the web interface users would be presented with the logon prompt but users could not authenticate and no error was given. The logon prompt would simply keep re-appearing. Using the Citrix Receiver no applications would launch through the storefront.